Midgar was my favorite part of FF7 too. I still think more could have been done with it, though.

As for the naughty screens, it's the kind of stuff I expect from the likes of Compile Heart or Idea Factory. Humorous "bromide" type screens peppered throughout the game that sometimes border on creepy. For all we know, the vines could be part of a tickle plant encountered somewhere in the game and the artists decided to make a visual "c wot i did thar?"

Would I still try out an English language version of Tokitowa? Sure, why not?

You guys do realize that the above was my point. The marketing and advertisements for FFVII were mostly about those really nice looking (at the time) cutscenes like the Bike Chase sequence and the Nibliheim flashback and showed almost nothing about the game itself, especially after Midgar and the Calm Flashback. It gave the impression of overthrowing an evil corporation in a five minutes from now dystopian future, but was instead spiky haired dudes with Popeye arms talking to floating old geezers in planetariums during your visits to Native American stand-in ville.

Which brings me back to the fact that I suspect this game is doing the same because the actual game itself turns into a dating sim after the first few hours (or something to that effect).